ProMind-LLM: Proactive Mental Health Care via Causal Reasoning with Sensor Data

Xinzhe Zheng, Sijie Ji, Jiawei Sun, Renqi Chen, Wei Gao, Mani Srivastava


Abstract
Mental health risk is a critical global public health challenge, necessitating innovative and reliable assessment methods. With the development of large language models (LLMs), they stand out to be a promising tool for explainable mental health care applications. Nevertheless, existing approaches predominantly rely on subjective textual mental records, which can be distorted by inherent mental uncertainties, leading to inconsistent and unreliable predictions. To address these limitations, this paper introduces ProMind-LLM. We investigate an innovative approach integrating objective behavior data as complementary information alongside subjective mental records for robust mental health risk assessment. Specifically, ProMind-LLM incorporates a comprehensive pipeline that includes domain-specific pretraining to tailor the LLM for mental health contexts, a self-refine mechanism to optimize the processing of numerical behavioral data, and causal chain-of-thought reasoning to enhance the reliability and interpretability of its predictions. Evaluations of two real-world datasets, PMData and Globem, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, achieving substantial improvements over general LLMs. We anticipate that ProMind-LLM will pave the way for more dependable, interpretable, and scalable mental health case solutions.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.1033
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
20150–20171
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.1033/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.1033
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinzhe Zheng, Sijie Ji, Jiawei Sun, Renqi Chen, Wei Gao, and Mani Srivastava. 2025. ProMind-LLM: Proactive Mental Health Care via Causal Reasoning with Sensor Data. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 20150–20171, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ProMind-LLM: Proactive Mental Health Care via Causal Reasoning with Sensor Data (Zheng et al., Findings 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.1033.pdf